Eugene Manlove Rhodes (January 19, 1869 – June 27, 1934) was an American writer, nicknamed the "cowboy chronicler". He lived in south central New Mexico when the first cattle ranching and cowboys arrived in the area; when he moved to New York with his wife in 1899, he wrote stories of the American West that set the image of cowboy life in that era. He moved back to New Mexico in 1926 and continued to write novels. In 1958, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
Biography
Rhodes was born in Tecumseh, Nebraska, to Hinman Rhodes and Julia Manlove who were wed March 5, 1868 at Rushville in Schuyler County, Illinois. He moved to New Mexico with his parents in 1881 and "fell in love" with the state. In 1883, Rhodes went to work for the Bar Cross Ranch, a period of employment that would form the basis of much of his subsequent writing.
By age sixteen, he was an accomplished horseman and stonemason and road builder. He helped build the road from Engle, New Mexico, to Tularosa, New Mexico.
Rhodes was an avid reader, and he was mostly self-educated in his youth. In 1888, he studied two years at the University of the Pacific in California. He began publishing anonymous works in the college newspaper. In 1890, he was unable to continue his studies due to financial problems.
His first non-anonymous work was the poem "Charlie Graham".
Rhodes gained a reputation for fighting. On May 20, 1892, the Rio Grande Republican newspaper reported that "Territory vs. Eugene Rhodes drawing a deadly weapon; case tried on Wednesday, and a verdict of guilty verdict returned." Rhodes' son, Alan, wrote that on another occasion Rhodes was assaulted by five gunmen during a stint ranching at San Andres, during which he sustained a head injury from the butt of a six-shooter. Alan believed that the head injury was responsible for much of Rhodes' subsequent irascibility.
